We're in Trouble (22 page)

At first he thinks he should find a hospital. A busy one in Milwaukee, maybe, where he might be able to sneak in and out of the parking lot. But he knows people who tried to drop off OD'd friends on hospital sidewalks before, and almost always they got spotted, their license numbers written down. If he's going to do this, he needs to think of something better than a stupid junkie trick.

He thinks about taking her back to her house, tucking her into bed, leaving her there. But she has too many roommates; someone would see him. Even if they didn't, they know she's been gone, and that Brad has a key.

There's only one way he can think to do it that's even halfway safe. He starts checking the road signs for a rest stop.

Mel's roommates will be a problem no matter what he does. They know him, they'll ask questions. He'll have to tell them—who is he kidding? He'll have to tell everyone—her friends, the people at the deli, probably even the cops—the same story, over and over:
Mel ran away, and I don't know why. She told me it was over Friday night. I've been going crazy trying to find her.

Or maybe he should tell them
he
broke things off. Give her a reason to vanish. Maybe he'll need to remind everyone that Mel's always been capable of this kind of thing.

He thinks about trying to speak to another girl sometime. One of those silly, glittery girls in the clubs. Dancing with her. Listening to the story of her life. Going to bed with her.

Hearing her whisper to him,
Have you ever been in love?

Once
, he'll say.

What happened?

She left me
, he'll say, and the next day he'll leave that girl, and the one after. He'll change his phone number and quit his job and move to another city. He'll live alone for the rest of his life.

F
IFTEEN MINUTES LATER
Brad pulls into a rest stop—exactly the kind he needs: isolated, out in the country. The sun is down below the horizon, but still glowing. He turns off the truck and unbuckles Mel's seat belt. Then he climbs out into the lot. He's almost alone, except for a couple of semis parked a hundred yards away, too far to see anything. The night is warm and wet; the smells of turning leaves and melting snow and Lake Michigan are all mixed in the air. In a few days it'll be like the storm never happened.

Brad spots a hooded pay phone next to the restrooms, and heads for it, digging in his pockets for change. His heart thumps and thumps, like footsteps up a long staircase.

He's holding the receiver in his hand, ready to dial, when a station wagon pulls off the highway, and parks in the space right next to the truck. Brad hangs up and walks quickly through the thick snow to a picnic table, out of the light. He watches a family—mom and dad and three young kids—spill out of the wagon. None of them seem to see him; none of them notice that a truck with a dead body inside is only inches away.

He waits out their trip to the bathrooms and to the vending machines, listens to their distant, happy chatter. They're like aliens. The father herds everyone back inside the wagon, and Brad wonders how the man—so obviously not a fuckup—got to be where he is.

An urge comes over him: he should go up to the man,
shake his hand, tell him what happened. But he can't do it, can't move. And then the station wagon drives away.

Brad wipes his nose on the sleeve of his jacket. The rest area's still empty. On the interstate only a few headlights are moving slowly past. He's as alone as he's going to get.

He walks back to the pay phone. While he dials he tries to make out Mel's outline through the passenger window.

A woman's voice says, Emergency Response, and Brad tells her what he's been practicing:

Someone's died of an overdose.

Then he walks away from the phone, toward the truck, leaving the receiver off the hook so they can trace the call.

He opens Mel's door. She starts to fall out; he lunges for her, hooks an arm underneath the blanket where he thinks her shoulder might be. She feels as hard as a piece of wood in there. He ought to just keep easing her down—put her on the sidewalk like he planned, and then drive like hell. But his grip isn't right—he's sure he's going to drop her. He bends his knees and heaves her back into the truck, harder than he'd like.

When she's back on the seat he sees that a strand of her hair has come loose, at the top of the blanket. Short and black, dirty and limp.

He stares at it for a few seconds, the weight of her body pressed against his chest Then he runs his finger across the strand. Her hair feels like he remembers—unbearably smooth.

He closes Mel's door, softly, so as not to hit her.

Brad's mouth is cottony. He walks quickly around the truck and climbs behind the wheel. For a few seconds he puts his hand on the keys in the ignition. Maybe another hour with her will be enough.

But it won't be. It just won't. There's nothing left to do, not anymore. The call has been made; the receiver is still dangling, off the hook. Right now police are on the way.

He touches her hair again. He has to put her on the sidewalk, drive away.

Or not.

This new idea doesn't come crazily—not like the one that sent him and Mel off to Michigan in the first place. It doesn't make him shake, like knowing he loved her did. It doesn't feel painful, like punishment. Not like telling everyone lies will. Not like having to say he stopped loving her.

You promised, he hears her say.

Mel, he tells her, it's different now.

This, he can do.

He puts his arm around Mel and draws her close to him. He touches the loose strand of hair with his lips. He's braced himself for a smell, this close to her, but there's nothing now, except the odors of the cabin—mold, smoke—clinging to the quilt. He moves his hand across the cloth, feeling, through it, Mel's ear, the line of her neck, the curve of her skull.

While he waits, he closes his eyes and remembers his first sight of her, the way she was dancing: like a crazy woman, her little body whipping out and around at the joints, her fists clenched and her teeth bared, her hair flying wild as she swung her head, like she was saying
no no no
to everyone but him.

He remembers the surprises: The scars across her wrists. The deepness of her voice. The way she'd curl up when she laughed. The way that, happy or sad, she'd cling to him. How proud that always made him feel. How, the night she asked him to live with her, she seemed to know all along he'd say yes.

Brad remembers that entire night, from start to finish: how afraid he was, at first—but also how easy he'd found it, in the end, to give in. How Mel had been angry at him, but only until he reached for her, held her tight and told her the truth: that he'd tried and tried, but he just couldn't imagine a future where she wasn't with him.

H
ERE IS AN EMPTY MEADOW, CIRCLED BY BARE AUTUMN
woods.

The trees of the woods—oak, maple, locust—grow through a mat of tangled scrub, rusty leaves, piles of brittle deadfall. Overhead is a rich blue sky, a few high, translucent clouds, moving quickly—but the trees are dense enough to shelter everything below, and the meadow, too. And here, leading into the trees from the meadow's edge, is a dirt track, twin ruts with a grassy center, winding through the woods and away.

The meadow floor is overrun by tall yellow grass, thorny vines, the occasional sapling—save for at the meadow's center. Here is a wide rectangular depression. The broken remains of a concrete foundation shore up its sides. The bottom
is crumbled concrete and cinder, barely visible beneath a thin netting of weeds. A blackened wooden beam angles down from the rim, its underside soft and fibrous. Two oaks lean over the foundation, charred on the sides that face it.

Sometimes deer browse in the meadow. Raccoons and rabbits are always present; they have made their own curving trails across the meadow floor. A fox lives in the nearby trees, rusty and quick. His den, twisting between tree roots, is pressed flat and smooth by his belly.

Sometimes automobiles crawl slowly along the track and park at the edge of the meadow. The people inside sometimes get out, and walk into the grass. They take photographs, or draw pictures, or read from books. Sometimes they climb down into the old foundation. A few camp overnight, huddling close to fires.

Whenever these people come, a policeman, fat and grayhaired, arrives soon after. Sometimes the people speak with him—and sometimes they shout—but always they depart, loading their cars while the policeman watches. When they are gone he follows them down the track in his slow, rumbling cruiser. When this happens in the nighttime, the spinning of his red-and-blue lights makes the trees seem to jump and dance.

Sometimes the policeman comes when there is no one to chase away.

He stops the cruiser and climbs out. He walks slowly into the meadow. He sits on the broken concrete at the rim of the crater, looking into it, looking at the sky, closing his eyes.

When he makes noise, the woods grow quiet. All the animals crouch low, flicking their ears at the man's barks and howls.

He does not stay long.

After his cruiser has rolled away down the track, the woods and the meadow remain, for a time, silent. But before long what lives there sniffs the air, and, in fits and starts, emerges. Noses press to the ground, and into the burrows of mice. Things eat, and are eaten.

Here memories are held in muscles and bellies, not in minds. The policeman, and the house, and all the people who have come and gone here, are not forgotten.

They are, simply, never remembered.

Sheriff Larry Thompkins tucked his chin against the cold and, his back to his idling cruiser, unlocked the cattle gate that blocked access to the Sullivan woods. The gate swung inward, squealing, and the cruiser's headlights shone a little ways down the track, before it veered off into the trees. Larry straightened, then glanced right and left, down the paved county road behind him. He saw no other cars, not even on the distant interstate. The sky was clouded over—snow was a possibility—and the fields behind him were almost invisible in the moonless dark.

Larry sank back behind the wheel, grateful for the warmth, for the static spitting from his radio. He nosed the cruiser through the gate and onto the track, then switched to his parking lights. The trunks of trees ahead dimmed, turned orange. The nearest soul, old Ned Baker, lived a half mile off, but Ned was an insomniac, and often sat in front of his bedroom window watching the Sullivan woods. If Larry used his
headlights, Ned would see. Ever since Patricia Pike's book had come out—three months ago now—Ned had watched over the gated entrance to the woods as if it was a military duty.

Larry had been chasing off trespassers from the Sullivan place ever since the murders, twelve years ago in December. He hated coming here, but he couldn't very well refuse to do his job—no one else was going to see to it. Almost always the trespassers were kids from the high school, out at the murder house getting drunk or high—and though Larry was always firm with them, and made trouble for the bad ones, he knew most kids did stupid things; he couldn't blame them that much. Larry had fallen off the roof of a barn, drunk, when he was sixteen—he'd broken his arm in two places, all because he was trying to impress a girl who, in the end, never went out with him.

But activity in the woods had picked up since the Pike woman's book appeared. Larry had been out here three times in the last week alone. There were kids, still, more of them than ever—but also people from out of town, some of whom he suspected were mentally ill. Just last weekend Larry had chased off a couple in their twenties, lying on a blanket with horrible screaming music playing on their boom box. They'd told him—calmly, as though he might understand—that they practiced magic and wanted to conceive a child there. The house, they said, was a place of energy. When they were gone Larry looked up at its empty windows, its stupid dead house-face, and couldn't imagine anything further from the truth.

The cruiser bounced and shimmied as Larry negotiated the turns through the woods. All his extra visits had deepened the ruts in the track—he'd been cutting through mud and ice
all autumn. Now and then the tires spun, and he tried not to think about having to call for a tow, the stories he'd have to make up to explain himself. But each time, the cruiser roared and lurched free.

He'd come here with Patricia Pike. He hadn't wanted to, but the mayor told him Pike did a good job with this kind of book, and that—while the mayor was concerned, just as Larry was, about exploiting what had happened—he didn't want the town to get any more of a bad name on account of being uncooperative. So Larry had gone to the library, to read one of Pike's other books. He picked one called
The Beauties and the Beast
, with the close-up of a cat's eye on the front cover. The book was about a serial killer in Idaho in the sixties, who murdered five women and fed them to his pet cougar. In one chapter Pike wrote that the police had hidden details of the crime from her. Larry could understand why—the killings were brutal; he was sure the police had a hard enough time explaining the details to the families of the victims, let alone to ghouls all across the country looking for a thrill.

We're going to get exploited
, Larry had told the mayor, waving that book at him.

Look
, the mayor said,
I know this is difficult for you. But would you rather she wrote it without your help? You knew Wayne better than anybody. Who knows? Maybe we'll finally get to the bottom of things.

What if there's no bottom to get to?
Larry asked, but the mayor had looked at him strangely and never answered, just told him to put up with it, that it would be over before he knew it.

Larry wrestled the cruiser around the last bend, and then stopped. His parking lights shone dully across what was left of the old driveway turnaround, and onto the Sullivan house.

The house squatted, dim and orange. It had never been much to look at, even when new; it was small, unremarkable, square—barely more than a prefab. The garage, jutting off the back, was far too big, and knocked the whole structure out of proportion—made it look deformed. The windows were too little, too few.

Since the murders the house had only gotten worse. Most of the paint had chipped off the siding, and the tiny pig-eyed windows were boarded over—kids had broken out all the glass years ago. The grass and bushes of the meadow had grown up around it, closing it in, made it look like the house was sinking into the earth.

Wayne had designed the house himself, not long after he and Jenny got married; he'd had no idea what he was doing, but—he'd told Larry, showing him the plans—he wanted the house to be unique.
Like me and Jenny
, he'd said, beaming.

Jenny had hated the house. She'd told Larry so, at her and Wayne's housewarming dinner.

It's bad enough I have to live out here in the middle of nowhere
, she'd said under her breath, while Wayne chattered to Larry's wife, Emily, in the living room.
But at least he could have built us a house you can look at.

Larry had told her,
He did it because he loves you. He tried.

Don't remind me
, Jenny had said, swallowing wine.
Why did I ever agree to this?

The house?

The house, the marriage. God, Larry, you name it.

When she'd said it she hadn't sounded bitter. She looked at Larry as though he might have an answer, but he didn't—he'd never been able to see Jenny and Wayne together, from the moment they started dating in college, all the way up to
the wedding;
I do
, Wayne had said, his cheeks wet, and Jenny's face had gone all soft, and Larry had felt a pang for both of them. At the housewarming party he told her,
It'll get better
, and felt right away that he'd lied, and Jenny made a face that showed she knew he had, before both of them turned to watch Wayne demonstrate the dimmer switch in the living room for Emily.

The front door, Larry saw now, was swinging open—some folks he'd chased out two weeks ago had jimmied it, and the lock hadn't worked right afterward. The open door and the black gap behind it made the house look even meaner than it was—like a baby crying. Patricia Pike had said that, when she first saw the place. Larry wondered if she'd put it into her book.

She had sent him a copy, back in July just before its release. The book was called
All Through the House
—the cover showed a Christmas tree with little skulls as ornaments. Pike had signed it for him:
To Larry, even though I know you prefer fiction. Cheers, Patricia
. He flipped to the index and saw his name with a lot of numbers by it, and then he looked at the glossy plates at the book's center. One was a map of Prescott County, showing the county road, and an X in the Sullivan woods, where the house stood. The next page showed a floor plan of the house, with bodies drawn in outline, and dotted lines following Wayne's path from room to room. One plate showed a Sears portrait of the entire family smiling together, plus graduation photos of Wayne and Jenny. Pike had included a picture of Larry, too—taken on the day of the murders—that showed him pointing off to the edge of the picture while EMTs brought one of the boys out the front door, wrapped in a blanket. Larry looked like he was running—his
arms were blurry—which was odd. They'd brought no one out of the house alive. He'd have had no need to rush.

The last chapter was titled “Why?” Larry had read that part all the way through. Every rumor and half-baked theory Patricia Pike had heard while in town, she'd included, worded to make it sound like she'd done thinking no one else ever had.

Wayne was in debt. Wayne was jealous because maybe Jenny was sleeping around. Wayne had been seeing a doctor about migraines. Wayne was a man who had never matured past childhood. Wayne lived in a fantasy world inhabited by the perfect family he could never have.
Once again the reluctance of the Sheriff's department and the townspeople to discuss their nightmares freely hinders us from understanding a man like Wayne Sullivan, from preventing others from killing as he has killed, from beginning the healing closure this community so badly needs.

Larry had tossed his copy in a drawer, and hoped everyone else would do the same.

But then the book was a success—all Patricia Pike's books were. And not long after that the lunatics had started to come out to the house. And then, today, Larry had gotten a call from the mayor.

You're not going to like this
, the mayor had told him.

Larry hadn't. A cable channel wanted to film a documentary based on the book. They were sending a camera crew at the end of the month, near Christmastime—for authenticity's sake. They wanted to film in the house, and of course they wanted to talk to everybody all over again, Larry first and foremost.

Larry took a bottle of whiskey from underneath the front seat of the cruiser, and, watching the Sullivan house through
the windshield, he unscrewed the cap and drank a swallow. His eyes watered, but he got it down and drank another. The booze spread in his throat and belly, made him want to sit very still behind the wheel, to keep drinking. A lot of nights he would. But instead he opened the door and climbed out of the cruiser.

The meadow and the house were mostly blocked from the wind, but the air had a bite to it all the same. He hunched his shoulders, then opened the trunk and took out one of the gas cans he'd filled back at the station, and a few rolls of newspaper. He walked to the open doorway of the house, his head ducked, careful with his feet in the shadows and the tall grass.

He smelled the house's insides even before he stepped onto the porch—a smell like the underside of a wet log. He clicked on his flashlight and shone it into the doorway, across the splotched and crumbling walls. He stepped inside. Something living scuttled out of the way: a raccoon, or a possum. Maybe even a fox; Wayne had once told him the woods was full of them, but in all the times Larry had been out here he'd never seen any.

He glanced over the walls. Some new graffiti had appeared:
KILL 'EM ALL
was spray-painted on the wall where, once, the Christmas tree had leaned. The older messages were still in place. One read:
HEY WAYNE, DO MY HOUSE NEXT.
Beside a ragged, spackled-over depression in the same wall, someone had painted an arrow and the word
BRAINS.
Smaller messages were written in marker—the sorts of things high-school kids write: initials, graduation years, witless sex puns, pictures of genitalia.

And—sitting right there in the corner—was a copy of
All Through the House
, its pages swollen with moisture.

Larry rubbed his temple. The book was as good a place to start as any.

He kicked the book to the center of the living-room floor, and then splashed it with gas. Nearby was a crevice where the carpet had torn and separated. He rolled the newspapers up and wedged them underneath the carpet, then doused them, too. Then he drizzled gasoline in a line from both the book and the papers to the front door. From the edge of the stoop he tossed arcs of gas onto the door and the jamb until the can was empty.

He stood on the porch, smelling the gas, and gasping—he was horribly out of shape. His head was throbbing. He squeezed the lighter in his hand until the pain subsided.

Larry was not much for religion, but he tried a prayer anyway:
Lord, keep them
.
I know you have been. And please let this work.
But the prayer sounded pitiful in his head, so he stopped it.

He lit a clump of newspaper, and, once it had bloomed, touched it to the base of the door.

The fire took the door right away, and flickered in a curling line across the carpet to the book and the papers. He could see them burning through the doorway, before thick gray smoke obscured his view After a few minutes the flames began to gutter. He wasn't much of an arsonist—it was wet in there. He retrieved the other gas can from the trunk and shoved a rolled-up cone of newspaper into the nozzle. He made sure he had a clear throw, and then lit the paper and heaved the can inside the house. It exploded right away, with a thump, and orange light bloomed up one of the inside walls. Outside, the flames from the door flared, steadied, then began to climb onto the siding.

Larry went back to the cruiser and pulled the bottle of whiskey from beneath his seat. He thought about Jenny; he thought about camping in the meadow as a boy with Wayne. He had seen this house being built; he'd seen it lived in and died in. Larry had guessed he might feel a certain joy, watching it destroyed, but instead his throat caught. Somewhere down the line, this had gotten to be his house. He'd thought that for a while now: the township owned the Sullivan house, but really, Wayne had passed it on to
him.

An image of himself drifted into his head—it had come a few times tonight. He saw himself walking into the burning house, climbing the stairs. In his head he did this without pain, even while fire found his clothing, the bullets in his gun. He would sit upstairs in Jenny's sewing room and close his eyes, and it wouldn't take long.

He sniffled and pinched his nose. That was a bunch of horseshit. He'd seen people who'd been burned to death. He'd die, all right, but he'd go screaming and flailing. At the thought of it his arms and legs grew heavy; his skin prickled.